


Ghosts In Winterfell

by Name_Pending



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Gen, Season/Series 07
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-16
Updated: 2018-01-16
Packaged: 2019-03-05 18:49:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13394034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Name_Pending/pseuds/Name_Pending
Summary: Sansa knows what she and Jon look like. Walking the halls of Winterfell, one could be forgiven for thinking that Ned and Catelyn had never left.





	Ghosts In Winterfell

She knows what the two of them look like. Walking the halls and walkways of Winterfell, discussing its upkeep, Sansa knows how it must look to anybody who might have been able to remember the better, safer days when her lord father was still the Lord of Winterfell. 

Jon resembles her father. He always had, the only one of Eddard Stark’s children save for Arya who inherited the Stark features. The others all had the Tully look. The last time Sansa had seen him, however, he had been a boy, one that she tended to ignore as politely as possible. After all, he was just her half-brother, just a bastard. Now, though, he is a man. He carries himself like the weight of all he has seen and done is pressing down on him all the time, and she thinks it probably is. She knows how that feels. Jon is solemn and dutiful now, the way Ned had been, and Sansa knows that his presence at Winterfell must seem to old servants like Eddard Stark has sent his ghost to rule. 

It’s not just Jon, she knows, but her as well. Sansa has always had the Tully features and knows that now she is a woman, no longer a silly little girl like she was when she left Winterfell for King’s Landing, she resembles her mother strongly. Lord Baelish comments on it frequently enough to remind her, but he needn’t bother. After all that she has been through, Sansa wraps dignity and honour around herself like armour, the way her mother always had. Sansa is the Lady of Winterfell now, like her mother before her, and she is as attentive to the castle as Lady Catelyn ever was. 

When she and Jon walk the halls, she thinks that the castle itself must shiver at what seem to be the ghosts of Ned and Catelyn Stark wandering around. The solemn Stark and the dignified Tully, united but in a way still distant. It must have been just like her parents were when her mother had first come to Winterfell after Robert’s Rebellion; Sansa knows that during their first years together, their relationship was far from easy and loving the way she remembered it to be. 

She knows, also, that the cause of the tension was not just that they were near strangers trying to become husband and wife, but also that they were doing so with Ned’s bastard son casting a shameful shadow over their marriage.

Now that same bastard takes charge of the castle and is called a king. It’s one way in which he’s different from Ned, who was never a king. 

Sansa knows that Jon must seem half the ghost of her father to anyone who remembers Lord Eddard, but she knows also that Jon is actually quite different. He’s haunted and sadder, more weighted by the knowledge of the Long Night to come. He still carries the name Snow, rejects the Stark name that Sansa offers because they both know that calling him that won’t change his parentage.

She’s not the same as her mother, either, no matter how much she looks like her or how much she tries to be as dutiful as Catelyn was. She’s scarred in ways her mother never was, damaged in ways Catelyn had never known. Sansa thinks on how Jon Snow’s existence was the biggest slight against Catelyn’s honour when she was at Winterfell and she envies her mother - the slights against her own honour, her body and soul, are far greater. There is ice around her heart that she is sure will never fully thaw. 

As she and Jon look down at the courtyard, alone save for the sounds coming from the bustling people below them, she is reminded of times when her mother and father would stand and look down just as they are now doing.

In Sansa’s memory, Ned and Catelyn look happier than she and Jon do. They stand closer together, smile more; they look down at people who are happy and safe, at their children playing. She and Jon stand with a foot of space between them, both of them serious, and the people below them are preparing for a winter like none have ever seen before. 

Ned and Catelyn had built a family here. All she and Jon want right now is to survive. 

Yes, Sansa knows that she and Jon are, in many ways, ghosts of the former Lord and Lady of Winterfell. But in more ways, they could not be more dissimilar.

She only prays that their differences will mean a different, happier ending. For both their sakes. 


End file.
